


Green Is The Color

by coralysendria



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-27
Updated: 2012-05-27
Packaged: 2017-11-06 03:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/414035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coralysendria/pseuds/coralysendria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha Romanov is afraid of Bruce Banner.</p>
<p>Spoilery for <i>The Avengers</i> movie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Green Is The Color

Natasha Romanoff is afraid of Bruce Banner. 

This is shameful. Natasha Romanoff should not be afraid of anyone or anything. She's the Black Widow, for fuck's sake, a talented spy and assassin, someone who is in total control of a situation even when handcuffed to a chair. 

She admitted her fear, once, softly, after the Tesseract was taken, when Coulson passed on the order to retrieve Banner. She had seen the footage; she knew what the Hulk was capable of. "My god," she had said into the open phone line, but she spoke in Russian, so Coulson could pretend he hadn't understood. Ridiculous, of course; Coulson speaks a dozen languages.

Everything can be killed. _Everything._ Even Loki, even _Thor_ , if the right weapon can be found -- and that is the reason Tasha is normally not afraid. Everything can be killed, and she is a killer. It's as simple as that. Except....

Everything can be killed, it appears, except Bruce Banner, a kind-seeming, soft-spoken, _gentle_ man. She should be able to snap him like the proverbial twig. But she has seen the footage. She has seen what happens when Banner becomes afraid, or his hidden, seething anger overwhelms him.

And now she has seen it at first-hand and in close quarters. The Hulk has come after _her_ \-- only minutes after Banner had admitted to trying to eat a bullet. He had tried to kill _himself_ , and the Hulk with him, and failed.

Natasha Romanoff is afraid of Bruce Banner.

Worse, Banner knows it. Even worse than that...he is ashamed of himself. Tasha can see his shame whenever he looks in her direction, the way he doesn't quite meet her eyes, the way he apologized in the middle of a war zone for what the Hulk had done.

She speaks easily of debts, of red in her ledger. But what color does she assign fear? Green, of course; the obvious choice, both for herself and for Banner. How does that fit into her ledger? How does green become black? How does she reconcile the gentle man Banner is with the terrifying monster he becomes? He tried to kill her. And yet...he saved Stark.

The reasoning behind that is obvious: She had brought him from a place where he felt safe to a place he did not want to be, to a place where people were afraid of him. Their fear -- her fear -- only fed into his anger. But Stark.... Stark had so obviously _not_ been afraid of him. Stark had treated him as an equal, as a friend, had poked him and teased him and actively _tried_ to aggravate him. And at the end of the battle with the Chitauri, when Stark was falling to his death...the Hulk caught him.

The answer then, the way to transform green to black, is to _not fear_ Banner. But....

Natasha Romanoff is afraid of Bruce Banner. And she cannot find a way around or through that fear. Not yet.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Disclaimer:** I don't own any of these characters. But I love them heaps. No profit will be had hereby.
> 
> This story was inspired by Natasha's response to Bruce yelling at her early in the movie. This is strictly movie-verse as I know nothing at all about the comics. But I lovelovelove the movies -- all of them.
> 
> Also, this is unbeta-ed; it fell out of my brain and I needed to share it.
> 
> Also, also, I have spelled Romanoff the way it is on IMDB, but used the AO3 character tag.


End file.
